Introduction
Russian official documents increasingly discuss the concept of an ‘eastward pivot’.
This is regarded by the international community as an important symbol of Rus-sian President Vladimir Putin’s overall strategic shift. However, there is no con-sensus among academics or in decision-making circles on how to evaluate this foreign policy. The existing research on Russia’s new strategy emphasizes that its identity has shifted from being a part of Europe to being separate from it. ‘Eurasia’
is invoked as the label for civilizational self-identification in Russia. In this sense, Russia’s turn to the East has emerged as a strategic pillar of Putin’s great diplo-matic transformation.
Irrespective of these trends, there is also a prevailing counter-narrative that maintains that despite its role as a peripheral European civilization, Russia is part of the West. These analyses favour the idea that Russia does not share an Asian identity, which makes it impossible for Russia to turn to the East. This line of
rea-4 Yang Cheng is a Professor of International Relations at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Shanghai International Studies University.
soning posits that the crisis in Ukraine serves as the fundamental motivation for Russia’s shift to the East.
According to this view, Russia is still pursuing a traditional balance of power strategy. As such, its orientation to the East is subordinate to its Western diplo-macy. In other words, it is only a tool or bargaining chip to reduce diplomatic pres-sure from the West. Even so, there are still many doubts about whether Russia can successfully achieve this strategy because of its political, economic and cultural priorities in Europe. These two prevailing arguments for Russia’s turn to the East make it worthwhile to explore the domestic and international drivers and their impact on China–Russia relations.
Russia’s eastward pivot
The assumption that an eastward pivot is Russia’s primary strategy raises the central question of how the East should be defined in terms of both geographic and imagined maps in the Kremlin. Throughout Russian history, major debates have occurred within an ‘East–West’ narrative framework. East, however, does not only refer to the Asia-Pacific region. Historically, the Westernizers, the Slavo-philes and the Eurasianists all lacked the contemporary concept of ‘Asia’.
The Westernizers advocated integration into Europe, while the Slavophiles and the Eurasianists supported a return to their own. Currently, the Russian mental map of the East contains not only the Asia-Pacific region, but also South East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Thus, Russia’s turn to the East, at the diplomatic level, equates with strengthening its fundamental cooperation with non-Western countries, while retaining its traditional identity as part of European or Western civilization.
According to Russian official and academic documents, turning to the East does not mean leaving Europe or joining Asia instead of Europe. The elites believe that Russia is incompatible with Asia’s culture and development path. They also believe that Russian culture is so unique that it cannot be integrated with either the tradition of Asian centralization or European liberalism. They argue that Rus-sia should have an independent status in the world. RusRus-sia’s Prime Minister, Dmi-try Medvedev, has pointed out that Russia needs to be more active in the East, for geographical and geopolitical reasons.5 However, he has also emphasized that Russia will not leave Europe politically, economically or psychologically.
Asia and Europe do not represent two alternatives for Russia. Instead, they are both consistently factored into its geostrategic calculations. Both East and West represent important directions of Russian foreign policy. Russia requires multi-faceted diplomacy and diversified economic cooperation with its external part-ners. Judging from these arguments, Russia’s turn to Asia can operate only in the diplomatic but not the civilizational or cultural sense. Russia’s so-called eastward
5 Beyond BRICS Blog at The Financial Times, ‘Guest post by Dmitri Medvedev: Russia must look east’, 2 Nov. 2012, <http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/11/02/guest-post-by-dmitry-medvedev-russia-must-look-east>.
redefining russia’s pivot and china’s peripheral diplomacy 9
pivot is not to discover or rediscover Asia. Its primary meaning is to strengthen relations between Russia and non-Western countries.
Domestic and international drivers
Russia has long been part of the East and turning in this direction is not a new idea of Russian diplomacy. Russian academic literature has discussed this pro-cess since the 1990s, but it was not seriously implemented as an eastward pivot until 2006. It predated the Ukraine crisis, and involves domestic and interna-tional factors. At the domestic level, its commercial content includes development of the Russian Far East and Siberia, with a focus on utilization of the region’s massive resource wealth. This has been a dream in Russia since Tsarist times and is frequently reiterated by President Putin. Its political meaning is to ensure that Russia can retain long-term control of these territories. As the last frontier, these regions are important as both a new source of wealth and an impetus for Russia’s future prosperity.
At the international level, Russia’s economic goal is to integrate itself into Asian markets, while its political goal is to develop closer relations with Asian countries to maintain Russia’s role as a great power in the region. The crisis in Ukraine has had an unintended impact on Russia’s turn to the East. Russia has realized that its economic lifeline is fragile in the face of Western sanctions. This situation has prompted Russia to seek cooperation with Asian countries to strengthen Rus-sia’s international position and to compensate for the damage caused by Western sanctions. After the crisis in Ukraine, Russia gave its pivot to the East too much strategic significance as a hedging tool against the West. In the context of the sanctions and the economic crisis, it has pursued immediate results and an influx of funds from the East to offset the damage done by Western sanctions. This has been achieved by attempting to accelerate the entry of Russian energy into the Asian market, among other initiatives.
However, readjusting an entire economic and trade structure is not an easy task. It is a lengthy and turbulent process. Political will cannot replace the laws of commerce overnight. Thus, while the current eastward pivot is more serious in content and nature than past such initiatives, it will take decades to implement even with the substantial amount of planning invested by Putin. The main chal-lenges in determining the nature and orientation of this strategy, however, are derived from within Russia. To become a member of Asia, Russia will require a more comprehensive understanding of its changing perceptions and identities.
China–Russia cooperation under the pivot
Objectively speaking, Russia’s turn to the East will create more opportunities for its cooperation with China, especially in the economic sphere. But these will be based on the actual needs and interests of the two countries. Promotion of a shared value system, maintenance of a security community and development of a stable regional and international order are traditionally identified as key signs
of success. China–Russia relations are subject to this same logic. One of the key factors is their similarity of regime type. Similar to ‘democratic peace’ theory, we are witnessing an ‘authoritarian peace’ between China and Russia. Their achieve-ments in recent years are not simply by-products of the Ukraine crisis. Instead, they have accelerated their bilateral cooperation, largely based on the consistent logic of their development priorities.
It is not correct to describe China and Russia as asymmetric partners: ‘asym-metric symmetry’ and ‘sym‘asym-metric asymmetry’ both exist. Asym‘asym-metric symmetry refers to both gross domestic product (GDP) and the determinants of comprehen-sive national power (CNP). The GDPs of China and Russia are imbalanced, and the latter lags far behind.6 However, in terms of CNP, Russia remains on an equal footing with China. Russia continues to surpass China in military power and Rus-sia still has a strong legacy in global governance. RusRus-sia’s international influence in security is also greater than that of China, such that the latter is still working to propel new international regimes forward from a starting point of zero. Symmet-ric asymmetry means that although China and Russia regard each other as equal partners, their level of bilateral cooperation in various fields is not symmetrical.
China–Russia cooperation on strategy, politics and security is, for the time being, far superior to their economic cooperation.
Takeaways
Russia’s eastward pivot does not mean a turn towards China. China is an impor-tant part of the East, but does not represent its entirety. Sinocentrism is a mislead-ing concept and downplays the extent of Russia’s penetration into Asia. Russia’s Asia policy has always been the pursuit of relatively balanced pluralism and multi-vectorism.
Nonetheless, faced with its diminished overall national power, Russia lacks ade-quate leverage in Asia. In this regard, while China is not the sole focus of its turn to the East, Russia has had to rely on enhanced cooperation to compensate for its limited strategic impact—and this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.